CHICAGO — For the first time, rental car agency shuttle bus drivers have been named a distinct people group, and a missionary has been assigned to evangelize them.

“Rental car agency shuttle bus drivers are a unique population with specific ministry needs,” says the Center for World Missions, which now identifies the drivers as a people group.

Rich Plummer, an Assemblies of God minister, has become the first full-time missionary to the group. He flies into airports and rides rental car agency shuttle buses all day, striking up friendships with the drivers.

“They really want company. They’re lonely and bored,” he says. “I could read the phone book and they’d listen.”

Plummer never leaves the airport, and often uses the shuttle driving job as a life metaphor.

“Do you ever feel like you’re going in circles?” he sometimes asks the drivers, to get a laugh.

“Every day of my life,” say most of them.

On a recent ministry trip to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Plummer hops off the Hertz shuttle bus and gets on the Avis shuttle bus. He introduces himself as the world’s first missionary to shuttle bus drivers.

“They always get a kick out of that,” he says later. “They’re curious what I have to say.”

Plummer can evangelize a whole shuttle system in a day or two, depending on how many shifts are running. At some airports he has established Bible studies. He visits his “congregations” every couple of months to help them handle shuttle bus driver issues like company rivalries and cutting each other off.

Plummer encourages them to see past their corporate allegiances and to “yield to each other as they yield to Christ.” •